#1 “In Search of a Majority: An Address”, Feb 1960

2. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

#3 James Baldwin: A Biography, David Leeming

3. … the trick is to love somebody…. If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

#4 Giovanni’s Room

4. Love him, love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

#5 “Doom and glory of knowing who you are” by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21, 24 May 1963

5. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

1. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.

#2-4 No name in the Street, 1972

2. People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

3. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

4 People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.

#5 Introduction to Nobody Knows My Name

5. ‘Be careful what you set your heart upon,’ someone once said to me, ‘for it will surely be yours.’ Well, I had said that I was going to be a writer, God, Satan, and Mississippi notwithstanding, and that color did not matter, and that I was going to be free. And, here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

6. It is true that two wrongs don’t make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn’t make a right, either.

#7 The Price of the Ticket, 1985

7. Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

8. I had to claim my birthright. I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all. (preface to the 1984 edition)

9. I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

10. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

#11 “Letter from a Region of My Mind” in The New Yorker, 17 November 1962

11. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

12. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.

#13 An interview with James Baldwin, 1961

13. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

19. Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

#20 James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

20. Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all. That’s the only advice you can give anybody. And it’s not advice, it’s an observation.

#25 James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78, The Paris Review, 1984, Jordan Elgrably: “What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer?”

25. Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

26. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

#27 James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78, The Paris Review, 1984, Jordan Elgrably: “Is that the way a book starts for you, though? Something like that?”

27. Probably that way for everybody: something that irritates you and won’t let you go. That’s the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that.
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Quotes attributed to James Baldwin

1. Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

2. I’ve always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.